The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [24]
I had no idea where I was, but I emphatically did not want to be there: topsy-turvy with walls pressing in on me, the crackle of broken glass accompanying my every motion, noises of distress beating at me. And not only noises—the enclosure was jumping in time to a pounding from outside.
My unoccupied hand came up of its own will and looped my dangling spectacles back onto my ears. With clarity came awareness: The panel in front of my nose had a hole in it. A bullet hole?
Suddenly the heavy reek of petrol was intolerable, and my entire body was seized by the need to be away—away! Whatever this enclosure was, it moved alarmingly with every blow from that person on the other side. My mouth formed some words—Stay there, perhaps?—and my body convulsed with the effort of turning the right way around.
On my knees was better than on my back. And my hands could grasp the lower (upper?) edge of the enclosure and tug: heavy, but it moved. The pounding and noise cut off abruptly, and I tugged again, but it was impossible to brace myself, crowded into this tiny space with another.
I would have more room to move if the small creature were not pressing against me—but what to do with it? I returned my grip to the lower edge of my cage, and said, “Get out when I lift this.”
And I lifted, straining with all my might and biting down on a scream of pain. The gap between hands and ground grew: two inches, then five, and now on a level with my hips. Quivering with effort, my skull near to explosion, I gasped, “Out!” and felt the creature squirm past me, beneath the dangerous weight of this structure, wailing in protest but obeying. A tiny pair of shoes gave a final kick against my knees, and then I was alone in the trap. I let the impossible weight settle down around me and collapsed against the side, panting and near to blacking out again.
The pounding started up again, with renewed urgency. A few of the accompanying words began to register: Petrol was chief among them, then fire.
A child’s voice from without joined the chorus, twining around the fire-person’s masculine bellows. My head—oh, my head! If they would only be quiet for a moment.
Estelle, that was the small creature’s name. And with her gone I could—just—manoeuvre myself into a half-standing, hunched-over position, my back against what was, in fact, the upturned floor of the enclosure. Which did me no good, since I couldn’t very well lift the weight and crawl out at the same time, but perhaps—
“Estelle? Estelle!” Shouting sent a bolt of agony through my head; it took me a moment to notice that she was no longer wailing and the man no longer shouting.
“’Stella, I need you to find something to prop under the back of the ’plane”—yes, there was an aeroplane in the equation—“when I lift it up. Can you find a big, heavy stick, about as tall as you are?” Could she? She was a mere child; I had no idea what she could do.
I heard her voice, although I couldn’t make out her words. She seemed to be moving towards my right, which indicated some kind of response to my command. The voice stopped, then started up again. It did this two or three times. A conversation? Did small children hallucinate? Or was it normal to converse with imaginary friends at times of stress?
“Estelle, can you find a stick, please? It’s really important, honey.”
“No, I—”
But her protest was cut off by a shudder in the enclosure, and without stopping to reflect on the unlikeliness of a child of forty months (even if she was Holmes’ granddaughter) understanding the fulcrum principle, I responded by pushing upwards with all my strength against the floorboards.
The machine rose, tail-end first, leaving the heavy engine off to my left. Tentatively, I let my knees sag a fraction; when the load remained up, I dropped to the ground and dove out from under the remains of the ’plane.
“Good work, Estelle,” I started to say, but then I saw her, thumb in mouth, staring towards the tail end of the